The RiDE Guide to Italy

Welcome to the RiDE Guide to Italy - our guide is packed with astonishing riding routes in Europe’s most motorcycle-friendly country. Italy is a fantastic place for a riding holiday, with spectacular mountains, golden beaches, rolling hills and fascinating towns.

When it comes to sights to see, this is a country loaded with heritage - from the Romans to the Renaissance, history has enriched the landscape of Italy like no other country in Europe. Better still, that landscape - mostly hilly, largely rural - is criss-crossed by some utterly amazing roads. True, the surface quality is variable, but that’s where this guide comes in, helping motorcyclists avoid the rough roads and find the best ones - and the best roads in Italy make-up a good case for being the best roads in Europe. The riding there really is that good.

But we don’t need to tell you that: just download our routes for your sat-nav and you can see for yourself. Enjoy the RiDE Guide to Italy - and enjoy discovering its amazing roads.

Our routes

We have motorcycling routes radiating out from 25 locations - from the very north of Italy to Sicily in the south. As Italy is a fair ride from the UK, we have weighted our coverage to the northern areas, most easily reached from Britain.

Rather than just one circular ride in each location, we’ve planned two, three or sometimes four different day trip routes in most locations. This gives you the option of riding to a base destination and then enjoying a couple of day’s riding cloverleafing out fro your hotel each day, rather than having to keep moving.

However, if you want to see more of the country, we have also planned a series of three-day tours across popular riding areas. Why three-day tours? To allow you you to take a relaxed three days to ride to the start point from Britain, take three days doing the tour, then spend three days returning - so the tours can fit in with just one week off work using both weekends.

Of course, if you have more time you can extend any one of the tours by adding one or two of our day trips, as our tours link together the towns where we’ve based our other routes. We also have two two-week tours of Italy, crammed with brilliant riding.

All our route descriptions include the mileage, a riding time and some suggested stops. The riding time does not, however include time spent at those stops - so if a routes is five hours long, expect to add two hours to that by the time you’ve had lunch, a few coffees, filled up ad stopped for pictures. Our routes are structured to be full days in the saddle and we have provided some long-day options as well as shorter ones, bit if you take long stops that will make even short routes into long days.

Rather than filling these pages with long directions, we’ve created google maps and sat-nav files for all the routes, which can be found at the end of each route description. Click on one of the destinations from the list on the right or visit our Italian routes page to search or browse.